God of the gaps--Don't Christians use God as a gap-filler to explain what they don't understand (things like reason, consciousness, order, information, life, and everything)?

Answer: When naturalists/atheists can explain how these things came about in natural terms coherently that correspond to reality then I will reconsider my worldview. Until then, I am perfectly justified in invoking The Law of Rational Inference.

I know that reason comes from reason and I have no reason to believe (take a blind leap of faith) that it can come from anywhere else.

I know that consciousness comes from consciousness and I have no reason to take a blind leap of faith that it can come from anywhere else.

I know that intelligence comes from intelligence and I have no reason to take a blind leap of faith that it can come from anywhere else.

I know that life comes from life and I have no reason to take a blind leap of faith that it can come from anywhere else.

As John Lennox wrote in God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?,“Rational intelligibility is one of the main considerations that have led thinkers of all generations to conclude that the universe must itself be a product of intelligence.”Lennox goes on and quotes Keith Ward:“Certainly Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Locke, Berkeley saw the origin of the universe as lying in a transcendent reality… They accepted that the universe is not self-explanatory. Thus, the inference to the best explanation from the origin and nature of the universe to an underlying non-physical intelligence has a long and impressive pedigree.”

Bottom line:Scientific knowledge would be impossible if the universe were not logical, intelligible and ordered. Christians make an inference to the best explanation of this fact—that the universe is rational and intelligible because it was created by a rational and logical being—God.

Atheists do not have to accept our inference, but until they can replace our inference with a more rational, and plausible explanation of the facts above, any outright dismissal of our inference is clearly not based on rational skepticism, but rather irrational cynicism.